Macrorit Disk Scanner vs smartmontools

Macrorit Disk Scanner performs surface tests to find bad sectors on storage devices. It can scan a whole disk, a partition, free space or a selected area. Healthy sectors appear green and errors red, and results can be saved to a chosen location as a readable log. The Free Edition scans one disk on Windows. Pro + Edition costs $18.95, paid once for one computer and adds simultaneous multiple-disk scanning and a report when scanning finishes. Unlimited Edition costs $99.95, paid once, covers an unlimited company license, supports Windows Server and includes multiple-disk scanning. A portable edition can run from a USB drive to scan offline disks. Listed supported storage includes HDDs, SSDs, hardware RAID, USB and external drives, flash drives, memory cards and other devices. Requirements include Windows, an x86-compatible 500 MHz CPU, 512 MB RAM and 100 MB disk space. Macrorit says it was founded at the end of 2012 and identifies itself as part of Bada Technology Co., Ltd.

smartmontools is a free package containing smartctl and smartd for controlling and monitoring storage devices through SMART. It supports ATA/SATA, SCSI/SAS, and NVMe disks, as well as SCSI/SAS tape devices. smartctl can report SMART health status, show capabilities such as error logging and offline surface scanning, display vendor-specific attributes, start device self-tests, and read their logs. A failing health status can mean a device has failed or predicts failure within 24 hours. smartd periodically monitors SMART status, error and self-test logs, and attribute changes; it can schedule tests and report errors and attribute changes to syslog. It also supports warning emails and executable commands. The project says it should run on modern Linux, BSD variants, macOS, Solaris, Windows, Cygwin, OS/2, eComStation, and QNX systems, and can run from various Live CDs and DVDs. The package uses the GNU GPL Version 2 license and was originally derived from the Linux smartsuite package. Its capabilities focus on SMART health reporting, testing, and ongoing monitoring.